ABSTRACT
In this chapter the author unpacks and explores sociologist Ken Plummer's 'intimate citizenship'. She explores various spaces within disabled people's lives – education and learning about sexuality and the body, the social and sexual context of youth, and the marked intrusion and lack of privacy endemic to disabled bodies and selves in dis/ableist cultures. The author problematises the absence of rights to intimate citizenship for disabled people and explores the labour, or management strategies, employed by informants to claim it. She shows that disabled people in her research routinely lacked many of the essential ingredients of intimate citizenship, and that this entailed significant psycho-emotional labour to survive, negotiate or resist. The author explores the three main themes of intimate citizenship; the control over one's body, feelings, relationships; access to representations, relationships, public spaces; and socially grounded choices about identities, gender experiences, erotic experiences. She examines informants' experiences of non-disabled gazes across different social contexts.
